Grocery shopping has always felt – to me at least – like the third or fourth circle of Dante’s infamous hell. When I can’t avoid it, I suffer through random carts parked in the middle of too-narrow aisles, dirty looks and muttered curses from the temporary owners of those same carts, and at the end of an obstacle course riddled by obnoxious and theoretically hungry shoppers, I get to stand…

I love when a marketer asks, “how should we measure this?” Sometimes we get so caught up in opens, clicks, visitors, impressions, and all the other easy-to-get metrics that we forget what we wanted to accomplish in the first place. This is why it is so important to set up a formal approach to measure your success before your marketing campaign launches. Yet a lot of marketers don’t know where to…

I’m starting to cringe every time I hear the phrase, “We could segment our audience based on that data”. People hear that phrase and eyes light up and heads bob in agreement. In meetings with the CMO/SVP, the phrase is carefully proffered as a goal about to be fulfilled, and the CMO/SVP solemnly nods and pats everyone on the back for having done a good job. What utterly useless, well-intentioned…

I cringe whenever a newsletter makes sense for a brand’s overall communication strategy. Not because I dislike newsletters – they have their place, both online and offline – but because in the ensuing conversation someone always offers the line, “we could have a ‘Did You Know’ section”! A few observations on this: It is best practice to always avoid asking yes/no questions. This one begs a “No, nor do I…

If your company is in a very price-competitive industry segment, you are probably stuck on the promotion treadmill. On the promotion treadmill, every day is another set of promotions, you are forced to send emails more and more often to help make sales goals, and every email screams a discount. You’re probably tired of hearing all the best-practice advocates telling you to jump off the treadmill and send lifecycle emails…

Originally printed on the Only Influencers blog. Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to help build out an entirely new attrition program. An attrition program tries to get customers who have left your product or service to come back – and it goes by a different name in every organization I’ve ever worked with. Attrition programs are hard to build, just like any other program, and our fabulous…

If you weren’t at the very last session at EEC last week, apparently you (and I) missed a knock-out session on deliverability. At the crux of it, participants seem to have taken two entirely different lessons from the session. Option 1: Deliverability is heavily reliant on engagement. Option 2: Deliverability has nothing to do with engagement. They’re both right, and they’re both wrong. The argument is an old one. Some…

Progressive profiling is hailed as a marketing technique that boosts lead generation, improves marketing intelligence, generates more conversions, and helps you gain more information about subscribers over time. Wow. It’s like listening to a commercial for Ginsu knives: “And that’s not all!” Progressive profiling isn’t all bad, but it isn’t as good as a Ginsu knife commercial would have you believe either. Here are some guidelines for when to use…

Facebook has teamed with Microsoft to create Graph Search, and they’re betting it will replace Google as the number one search provider. The premise (nicely articulated by Dave Williams in a recent AdAge post) is that by including what you say you like on Facebook into a search algorithm, searches will be better targeted to your needs. Better results will then yield more interest, ultimately dethroning Google as king of…